agrees to ignore, we get the clue to the
irregularity of right and left in the human arm, and finally even the
particular direction of the printed letters now before you.

For primitive man did not belong to polite society. His manners were
strikingly deficient in that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de
Vere. When primitive man felt the tender passion steal over his soul, he
lay in wait in the hush for the Phyllis or Daphne whose charms had
inspired his heart with young desire; and when she passed his
hiding-place, in maiden meditation, fancy free, he felled her with a
club, caught her tight by the hair of her head, and dragged her off in
triumph to his cave or his rock-shelter. (Marriage by capture, the
learned call this simple mode of primeval courtship.) When he found some
Strephon or Damoetas rival him in the affections of the dusky sex, he
and that rival fought the matter out like two bulls in a field; and the
victor and his Phyllis supped that evening off the roasted remains of
the vanquished suitor. I don't say these habits and manners were pretty;
but they were the custom of the time, and there's no good denying them.

Now, Primitive Man, being thus by nature a fighting animal, fought for
the most part at first with his great canine teeth, his nails, and his
fists; till in process of time he added to these early and natural
weapons the further persuasions of a club or shillelagh. He also fought,
as Darwin has very conclusively shown, in the main for the possession of
the ladies of his kind, against other members of his own sex and
species. And if you fight, you soon learn to protect the most exposed
and vulnerable portion of your body; or, if you don't, natural selection
manages it for you, by killing you off as an immediate consequence. To
the boxer, wrestler, or hand-to-hand combatant, that most vulnerable
portion is undoubtedly the heart. A hard blow, well delivered on the
left breast, will easily kill, or at any rate stun, even a very strong
man. Hence, from a very early period, men have used the right hand to
fight with, and have employed the left arm chiefly to cover the heart
and to parry a blow aimed at that specially vulnerable region. And when
weapons of offence and defence supersede mere fists and teeth, it is the
right hand that grasps the spear or sword, while the left holds over the
heart for defence the shield or buckler.

From this simple origin, then, the whole vast difference of right an